“Assuming you’re correct,” Sonara said.
Azariah nodded. “All we can do at this point is assume.”
“Your power,” Sonara said.
Azariah smiled softly. “Magic,” she corrected her. “It is called magic.”
“You’re afraid of it.”
The Princess flinched, but did not disagree. She sighed, looking at her hands as they lay side by side on their stomachs, the rock beneath them cooling with the night. “Freedom is a tricky thing, Devil. I’ve spent a lifetime dreaming of it. Hoping that someday, it would be mine. And now that it’s here... I’m not so sure how to handle it.”
“You did just fine when you helped free me from the prison caravan,” Sonara said.
Azariah frowned. “Perhaps it is because then, he was far away.” She looked down at the valley, where her father’s massive frame could be easily picked out of the crowd.
“You’re not his anymore,” Sonara said. “You never were.”
“A statement I know to be true,” Azariah answered, as the wind blew, and Sonara’s curse winked open a single shadowy eye.Sadness, like the withering roots of a plant forgotten and left to die beneath the boiling suns.“And yet, in his presence, I still feel like the chain is around my throat.”
“Then you have to kill him,” Sonara said. Azariahdidbalk at that. “You have to kill him, as he once killed you,” Sonara explained, as she swallowed the sadness away. “But this time, you must ensure that no being—no goddess or planet or great source of power—will be able to bringhimback.”
As she said it, her eyes were focused, not on Jira, but on another figure down in the crowd.
A queen with blue hair who stopped her work and looked south with weary eyes, as if she were searching for a glimpse of the faraway sea.
For the next two days, the group took turns watching, and waited for hours on end to learn all they could about the Wanderers and their patterns, and how to disrupt them.
And each night, the Wanderer Sonara had killed came to the loading dock and stood alone, looking down at the Dohrsarans below.
Sonara watched him, taking note. Each day, without fail, he came.
“He stands in the same place, staring out at the horizon, like he’s just watching. Waiting,” Sonara said.
Beside the small landing dock that jutted from its side, the rest of their skyship was fully enclosed. It was still held aloft by some invisible force, hovering beside the fingertips of the fallen goddess. Their blue light-wall did not falter. It remained intact at all hours of the night and day. The only access to the ship was the landing dock where the Wanderer stood, open to the air.
“My father once had an enemy he couldn’t defeat,” Azariah said, on the way back from their next stakeout together. She and Sonara were more relaxed, their words flowing a bit easier with each hour they’d had to spend together in the sweltering heat, watching the Wanderers. “He swapped brute force for cleverness. He captured his enemy’s son. Tortured him, got the information out of him, and when he was done… he delivered his head in a box.”
She said it so matter-of-factly, as no other princess Sonara had ever met would do.
“Then that is what we must do,” Sonara said. “We will steal the weakest of them.” She pointed behind her, where the Wanderer that was once dead, now alive again, turned back and disappeared into the ship. Like clockwork. “We’ll take him.”
Azariah, to her credit, did not object. “But… how do you propose we do that?”
Overheard, a flock of fowl suddenly flitted past, their presence surprising Sonara. They screeched and turned when they got too close to the light-wall, but they rose with the wind.
Higher.
Soaringaboveit, until they reached the other side.
Sonara smiled as she finally found their way in. “We’ll get to him the only way we can,” Sonara said. “From above.”
Chapter 21
Karr
He should not be alive.
But Karr’s heartbeat was as steady as it had ever been, a constant thrum in his chest as he paced on the exterior landing dock of theStarfall,his head aching from the effort of trying to discoverhow.
